What does the word “schmooze” mean to you? Is schmoozing good, bad, ugly, indifferent? Would you schmooze with your friends, your girlfriend, your family? Think about it for a second and then look under the cut.

Schmooze descends from the Hebrew shama “to hear,” which led to shemu’oth meaning “news, rumors.” This word was the source for the Yiddish verb schmues “idle talk, chat,” which in turn was the basis for the verb shmuesn “to chat.” The English version, schmooze, emerged in the 1897, because the 1890’s was a major decade for immigration to the United States, thus inviting an abundance of foreign loanwords.

If you are a native English speaker, chances are you, like me, associate bad connotations with the word “schmooze,” perhaps a sense of obsequiousness. In fact, the individuals I asked all agreed that schmoozing —almost universally defined as “sucking up” —definitely is not something you do with your friends. More like with your dean or boss. (An Askmen.com article on the art of schmoozing begins, “Being a schmooze isn’t necessarily seen in a positive light…”)

However, if we were to look the word up in the dictionary, our intuitions might be contradicted. For instance, Oxford English Dictionary, the multi-volume compendium of English word history, defines the word as “to chat, gossip, engage in a long and intimate conversation.” Cambridge Dictionary of American English defines schmoozing as “talking informally with someone,” and Webster’s defines schmooze as “idle talk, chat.”

The American Heritage Dictionary, however, defines the word as “To converse casually, especially in order to gain an advantage or make a social connection.” Merriam-Webster and Encarta English dictionaries provide  similar definitions, and I especially like M-W Online’s example sentence, “She schmoozed with her professors.”

What you should take from this is that not all dictionaries were created equal. In fact, dictionaries are compiled by scholars (called lexicographers), and different dictionaries have different objectives depending on the goals of the lexicographers and editors. As linguist and politician S.I. Hayakawa wrote,

“The writing of a dictionary is not a task of setting up authoritative statements about the ‘true meanings’ of words, but a task of recording, to the best of one’s ability, what various words have meant to authors in the distant or immediate past. The writer of a dictionary is a historian, not a lawgiver.”

As any student of history should know, one’s view of history changes depending on which source material you reference. As U. Penn linguist Mark Libermann wrote, “Standards [recorded in dictionaries] depend on usage. The key question is ‘whose usage?’, and there is more than one reasonable answer.” Merriam-Webster in particular is infamous among linguists for being especially liberal of what it considers words to admit into its lexicon. In 2004, McDonald’s agitated against M-W’s Collegiate Dictionary when it defined “McJob” as “low-paying dead-end work.”

Another Yiddish borrowing in English is the word schmuck,” literally meaning “penis” and metaphorically meaning “contempible person.” The word was regarded as taboo in Yiddish-speaking communities, leading speakers to euphemize it into the word “schmo” which we still hear in “Joe Schmo” (the hypothetical boringly average person often referenced in thought experiments). Note that only between 2 and 4 million people still speak Yiddish today—Yiddish itself being “a fusion of German, Hebrew, Slavic, and other languages”—so someday the only remnants of the language may be these loanwords.

Now that that’s settled, let me schlep this spiel onto the blog so that I can do some noshing at Leo’s; hopefully I won’t get any chutzpah for being a klutzy etymologist. Oy vey!